Party school? Safety school? Not so much anymore.

UMass Amherst may not have entirely outlived those nicknames and reputations. But its become so surprisingly selective that the alumni magazine ran a story recently titled Could You Still Get In?

The answer may be no, says Kevin Kelly, the director of admissions.

Many people who once found it easy to get into UMass would struggle to be admitted now, frankly, Kelly says. Its not the UMass that it was 20 years ago. Its not the UMass that it was even 10 years ago.

The number of applicants for the roughly 4,600 freshman seats available each year has increased from about 20,000 to more than 34,000 since just 2005, while their average GPA is up from 3.38 to 3.66 and combined SAT scores from 1143 to 1197.

The reason, in a word: price. Tuition, fees, room, and board add up to $23,167, less than half the cost of many Massachusetts private universities.

I wanted to reduce the amount of loans Id need to pay back, says Leo Sheehan, a junior from Raynham who plans to go to medical school and decided on UMass over Boston University.

The main difference for me was that BU was $33,000 more, he says. And they offer the same thing.

Students such as Sheehan have pushed the number of applicants accepted at UMass from 80 percent 10 years ago to 63 percent now. That makes it only slightly easier to get into than BU, though much easier than Northeastern and Boston College partly because its freshman classes are so much bigger, Kelly says.

The number of applicants from out of state has also doubled since 2005, to more than 15,400.

Read the rest here:
Would UMass accept you today? Don’t be so sure.